Eco Grid

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EcoGrid

is a next generation internet architecture for data storage, sharing, access and analysis. It combines the features of a Data Grid for storage of ecological data and a Compute Grid for analysis and modeling services. The EcoGrid allows scientists access to ecological, biodiversity and environmental data and analytic resources (such as: data, metadata, analytic workflows and processors) networked at different sites and at different organizations via the internet.

The EcoGrid will form the underlying framework for data and service discovery, data sharing and access, and analytical service sharing and invocation. Specifically, it will provide:

• seamless access and manipulation of ecology data and metadata stored at distributed nodes (including scalability, multiplicity of platforms (desktop to super computers) and storage devices);
• authentication through a single sign-on authentication and multi-level access control;
• execution of analytical pipelines via web services (WSFL, and WSDL, XPipe);
• node registry for data and compute nodes based on UDDI;
• rapid incorporation of new data sources as well as decades of legacy ecological data;
• extensible, ecologically relevant metadata based on the Ecological Metadata Language,and
• replication of data to provide fault tolerance, disaster recovery and load balancing

By extending the expressiveness of service description languages (e.g., WSDL [1], WSFL [2]) for enhancing data and analytical service Grid capabilities, the EcoGrid will result in an integration of data-, compute-, and service-grids for ecology.